Teaching and Research Interests

My research focuses on the literature and culture of Victorian Britain and Ireland, though I also have a longstanding interest in eighteenth-century Ireland and especially the history and pre-history of Gothic literature on this island.

To date, I have written five monographs: two on Oscar Wilde - The Faiths of Oscar Wilde (Palgrave, 2005); The Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde (Ashgate, 2007) - and three on Gothic literature: Gothic Ireland (Four Courts Press, 2005); Gothic Literature, 1825-1914 (University of Wales Press, 2009); The Emergence of Irish Gothic Fiction (Edinburgh University Press, 2013). All five focus extensively on the significance of religion in cultural studies. I have also edited three collections of essays on major writers of Irish Gothic literature, Oscar Wilde (Irish Academic Press, 2010); Bram Stoker (Four Courts Press, 2013); Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu (Peter Lang, 2016). I also organized two major international symposia in Trinity College on Bram Stoker (2012) and Sheridan Le Fanu (2014). At the moment, I am writing articles on the Irish Gothic, romance writer Nora Roberts, Oscar Wilde and ghosts, Varney the Vampire and Victorian hygiene, and Harry Clarke’s fairy tale illustrations, and beginning a book-length study of the discourse of childhood in eighteenth-century Irish writing and culture.

Prior to my appointment to Trinity College, I was Lecturer in Victorian Literature in Keele University, Staffordshire (2004-05). I have also lectured in Irish Studies, in both Ireland (in University College Dublin) and Canada (at the University of Toronto).

I am convenor of the Senior Freshman module in Victorian Literature and the Junior Freshman module on Genre: The Novel. Much of my teaching involves the study of popular literature, including Victorian Gothic and Victorian children’s literature, and I am particularly interested in the intersection of religion and contemporary popular literature, the popular romance, the discourse of the child in literature and culture, and Gothic and horror in all their manifestations.

‘Gendering the Victorian Ghost Story? Victorian Women and the Challenge of the Phantom’ The Ghost Story from the Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century, eds Helen Conrad O’ Briain and Julie Ann Stevens. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2010, pp. 81-96.